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[M]y friend is an endangered species. He's spent all his working life with the same firm: he's what the American commentator William Whyte, writing in 1956, called 'organisation man'. Whyte worried that we'd all be swallowed up by bureaucratised capitalism, becoming organisation men and women whose future was determined by our employers. We know now how wrong he was. Richard Florida is just one of a host of modern commentators who have charted the fragmentation of the world of work, the rise of the 'knowledge economy' and the pivotal role of creativity and choice in determining which places and people succeed. So in this new creative, sexy, entrepreneurial, rollercoaster economy, are the organisation men and women going the way of the dinosaurs? Not quite. Try visiting your local town hall or, if you're lucky enough to have an office near you, a government department.
What will strike you isn't the corporate image - these places are often quite liberal about dress codes, timekeeping and so on - but, more often than not, the corporate subservience. The ethos of public service frequently comes at the price of personal servitude: risk taking is frowned upon, initiative and invention viewed with suspicion. And that's worrying, because these are the very people who are charged with nurturing economic and social creativity. The idea that you can sow the seeds of creativity to a rhythm of indicators and targets is a bit like writing symphonies for Stalin: it has been done, but aren't there better ways of making music?
Most of my students stay clear of government work for precisely this reason. They see far more creative energy and entrepreneurism in not just startup companies but in the non-profit sector. Maybe things are a little more relaxed in Dobson's neck of the woods, but the only time I strap on a suit and tie is to meet with government types. Going into the U.S. Capitol seems as if one has taken a time machine back to the workplace attire and aattitudes of the 1950s.
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